And I'm a slow writer: five six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.

Be polite write diplomatically even in a declaration of war one observes the rules of politeness.

My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time.

I don't think you can tell the objective truth about a person. That's why people write novels.

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction.

I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach one that writing is hard work and two that you have to give up a great deal of life your personal life to be a writer.

To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth it means to discover a truth.

A writer should have this little voice inside of you saying Tell the truth. Reveal a few secrets here.

Always speak the truth think before you speak and write it down afterwards.

A writer's job is to tell the truth.

For a creative writer possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity.

When I sit at my table to write I never know what it's going to be until I'm under way. I trust in inspiration which sometimes comes and sometimes doesn't. But I don't sit back waiting for it. I work every day.

Apart from a few simple principles the sound and rhythm of English prose seem to me matters where both writers and readers should trust not so much to rules as to their ears.

A lot of time you write out of some unconscious place. I try to trust what is coming and where it wants to take me.

You never know if you're a writer. You can't trust it. If you woke up and said 'I'm a writer ' it would be gone. You wouldn't see anything for miles - even the dust would be running away.

Writing doesn't come real easy to me. I couldn't write a novel in a year. It wouldn't be readable. I don't let an editor even look at it until the second year because it would just scare them. I just have to trust that all these scraps and dead-ends will find a way.

How I work is I work from of very character-driven place. And I trust the writers.

One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing.

As time goes by I realize that I do trust the wind. And I often write my songs for myself.

Every time I make American film I just trust American directors and American writers.

You have to first be a writer and somebody who loves to write. If I couldn't travel I would still write.

You become a better writer by writing. You become a better travel writer by writing about travel.

But he knew people and he was head writer for Have Gun Will Travel and if you took those early Star Treks that we did and put us in a western wardrobe and put us on wagon train going west we can say the same lines.

I just don't see myself as a travel writer. I can't. I don't.